Gerlinde Höbel
Department of Biological Sciences, UW-Milwaukee, hoebel@uwm.edu
Surviving and reproducing successfully depend on an animal’s ability to process information from the environment and respond adaptively. In many situations an individual must perform different activities at the same time (i.e. foraging and predator vigilance). If these activities compete for the same computational resource, for example, if both require visual or auditory attention, the brain’s ability to process the information may constrain the performance of both tasks. Behavioral Lateralization, where different types of information are channeled into the two separate halves of the brain, thereby allowing parallel processing to take place in the two brain hemispheres, may alleviate this problem. Lateralized motor preference (i.e., preferential limb use or “handedness”) may be associated with brain lateralization. For example, in humans brain lateralization for language and handedness are linked. Lateralization and handedness, once believed to be a unique feature of the human brain, is now recognized to be also present among vertebrates and even some invertebrates. Data for amphibians, however, is still very scarce. We have initiated a project examining handedness and behavioral lateralization in frogs. Preliminary data from gray treefrogs (Hyla versicolor) suggest that these frogs show individual handedness in some—but not all—behavioral tasks.